Arkana
by Obsidian Demon
Summary: Life had been easy, once... Ongoing series.
1. The Fool

He remembered a dream.

The sky was clear and the sun was warm on his face. There were no suits and hats to look out for, and he knew nothing about spies trying to shoot each other. Someone was with him, and they walked through the streets of the city they lived in, spent the afternoon just relaxing somewhere in a park that, he was remotely aware, wasn't there anymore. It was beautiful, in an unobtrusive way. Daisies, buttercups, children playing. Life had been easy, then.

He wished he could go back to that time, to live without a care. And he wished, even more, to go back to live with that someone who had been there with him, and to share this feeling once more. Just for a moment. He could remember it. All he had to do was to keep his eyes closed for just a second longer.

He couldn't. There was work to do.

Later, he looked down at the bomb he had wired below a hotel. The timer was set, and now all he had to do was leave, calmly, if possible, so no one suspected him. Two-hundred people were going to die as soon as he had gone far enough to push the button, among them forty-two black nation spies and an ambassador. He didn't particularly care for the other one-hundred and fifty-three.

As he walked through the park a mile down, he still heard the screams and the sirens. Mission accomplished, as far as he was concerned. Someone else was there to tell if he had gotten them all, someone else still to make sure that there was no official connection of this incident to anyone in a white suit. Spies... It was so obvious, but if you asked, no one knew about it. The thought made him smile.

On the other side of the park, he lifted his feet to get into the car, leaving daisies and buttercups with their stems broken, crushed under his shoes. He remembered for a second that he had thought of another place like this in the morning, but he couldn't quite put a finger on it. A nightmare, maybe, or a memory best left forgotten. Trying to remember what his life had been like before becoming a spy was like walking a cliff, and falling was one of the few things he actually was afraid of.

He closed his eyes again and tried to bring to his mind what it had been, anyway. He found nothing. In his memory, there was nothing before the hat and the gun. He knew that this couldn't possibly be, but the idea was strangely soothing. He opened his eyes again and started the motor. Maybe, ignorance really was bliss.


	2. The Magician

It had started right here. Or at least, in a place very much like this one, with narrow, interlaced alleys, somewhere between empty apartments and disused warehouses. When, he did not know. The game had gone on for as long as he could remember, and for almost as long as he had known the game, he had known him, the white spy, the one with the ice blue eyes.

He had been running as fast as he could, a file tucked beneath his jacket, trying to get on the plane, to get back to the embassy as fast as possible, before the information he had gathered was worthless. Then it had hit him: a bullet, right to the forehead, instantly deadly. And all he had seen had been a glimpse of white, and those eyes – sharp, focused, intense. And when he fell and his brain shut down, his last thought was that he had to see those eyes again, that more than anything else in the world, he needed to see those eyes again, because they were like his, and because he owed the spy behind them a bullet to the forehead.

When he had opened his eyes the next morning and found himself without the file, but other than that unscathed, he wondered if it had been a dream. But it hadn't been. There was a puddle of blood, half dried, and a bullet, bloody as well, right beside him. There was also a hole in the brim of his hat, and no doubt whatsoever that yesterday, he had been shot, and that said shot ought to have killed him instantly, which it had.

It was far too easy to take the impossible for a fact when it meant that you got to live a little longer. It had gotten even easier, these days. They had met more than once, since then, and it was a rare event that both of them got out of such a meeting alive.

Still, here they were, blowing and carving and shooting each other up every other day. And the blue-eyed one was White, the one white spy that always came back, as he was Black, the only one in his agency who seemed to last. The others never did, but it didn't matter anymore. What they had started was a magic game of explosive chess, and it would go on and on and on. Everyone and everything else had become pale and meaningless.

The day's last beams of sunlight reflected on his sunglasses, along with flickering fires of an old apartment house burning. A white hat sailed towards the ground, carried by a current of heated air. It was their game now, he realized with a satisfied grin on his face, and this round was going to him.


	3. The High Priestess

She saw it all, the enmity, the rivalry. And she saw what had caused it, too, she knew where they came from. She saw the little game they played from the outside, and smiled on the inside. There was so much they did not understand about what was going on between them, and who they were. It was obvious, but they were meant not to see it. Even though one close look would have done, none of them was able to take it.

She knew.

The lady in gray walked past the mutilated bodies and nodded, pleased with herself. Pieces of white and black cloth were scattered across the ashen street, spattered with occasional red slops. She wiped some brain off the back of her nose, picked the phone out of her purse and flicked it open. Someone needed to clean up the mess, and she needed to take a bath. Her deeds for the day had been done. And things were going surprisingly well.


	4. The Empress

_Black looked into the mirror, tending to a small cut on his face. He had dodged the knife just on time, but stumbled and hit the oversized bear trap behind him in the process. It had split his head in half. Most of the lethal wound had disappeared by now, but for some reason his left eyebrow stubbornly refused to heal properly. Getting killed was routine these days, but getting killed because... He growled angrily at his reflection. Stupid. Far beyond stupid. How could he ever have been distracted? By a woman, no less. _

White cursed and downed another handful of aspirin. Two days had passed, and his ears were still ringing. For what might have been hours, he had just stared at the woman, even after he had torn his eyes away from the obvious curves and those oh so long legs.

_But there had been something about her, something hard to describe. It wasn't only that she had worn that gray costume like regalia, standing in the middle of that street as if she owned the world. It wasn't even that he suspected that there was more behind that smile than he could even imagine. What disturbed him was that she had come to that place just to see them finishing each other of, and made no secret of it. The Lady had watched them like an emperor watched his gladiators. And there was another feeling he had._

The smile had been it, green eyes gazing right into him, full lips curled, commanding him to keep looking, to just watch and wait until she told him what to do. Thumbs up or thumbs down…

_She knew._

When he had noticed that she was holding up a knife and a detonator, it was far too late, nonetheless. As Black fell over and got crushed by the trap he had set up for him far earlier, he realized that he was standing right on the bomb.

_All about him, all about White, and she knew that they knew, without any doubt. She looked right through them. She had found their game entertaining, and, in a single gesture, made it her own. _


End file.
